#2: Slow Down to Speed Up Your Strategic Marketing with John Lynn

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Creating space for your healthcare products in today’s world is a must. But how do you get the attention your products deserve? To answer this question, I invited John Lynn, founder of HealthcareScene.com, to Mission Marketing.

John’s flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, boasts over 13,000 articles that have been viewed 20 million times and cover a broad spectrum of EMR and Healthcare IT topics. John is a prolific writer - he wrote over half of those articles.

As an advisor to Health IT businesses and an organizer of Health IT conferences, he is devoted to improving the industry.

John’s background

Everyone gets into health IT differently, and John is no exception. He didn’t set out to become a leading professional in this industry. Instead, during his time working for two different universities, he was thrown into it.

After implementing an electronic healthcare record for the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, he began a blog on EMR and from there gradually became more and more immersed in health IT.

When the Obama administration issued a stimulus package to EMR, John’s blog exploded with readers and advertisers…all looking for advice and insight into EMRs. Eventually, John left his day job to devote himself fully to all things Healthcare IT and EMR.

Great content is key

It’s true that great SEO was instrumental in his success, but he also capitalized on great content. And according to him, great content is tied to passion and confidence - many people sell themselves short on what they can offer, but everyone has firsthand knowledge of something that few others have. So write about what you know, and you’ll be helping someone.

To be a good content creator, you need to read, John says, because people who read give themselves fodder for good communication. Beyond that, you need to know yourself. What are your strengths? What are your pitfalls? Knowing these things can help you develop partnerships and strategies for greater success.

You don’t have to look far for great ideas either. Social media offers fresh perspectives with minimal time investment. So choose your social network carefully and load your social media with people you can learn from. (hint hint…add John to your network. He’s a great person to learn from.)

Trends in healthcare IT marketing

As the founder of the Healthcare IT Marketing Conference, John is the guy to learn from when it comes to current trends in healthcare IT especially buying trends.

Know your customer

It’s important to consider how your consumers tend to buy. In healthcare, customers don’t make impulse purchases. They make calculated and intentional buys which means you need content that builds long term relationships with people in this industry.

Great content influences everyone involved in the purchasing decision

The power of good content is that it influences people across a broad spectrum. This is essential in healthcare because purchases are rarely made by a single person but are made by groups. Content marketing is an effective way to influence committees to invest in your product.

Easy marketing won’t get you an ROI

An unfortunate trend is short-term or easy marketing tactics that may get you quick wins but result in poor long-term ROI. For instance, don’t expect mass emails to cover your marketing bases. Be strategic in who you reach out to and how you reach them.

Marketing your features and functions will get you nowhere

If you as a company follow the marketing trend that focuses on what you DO, you aren’t harnessing your full marketing potential. Customers want to know how your product will meet THEIR NEEDS. If you like many others expect your customers to make this connection on their own, you’ve already lost them. They simply don’t have the time or incentive to figure it out on their own. Do the work for them and use your content to put their needs and concerns first.

How to analyze success…your relationships

Metrics are tricky in health tech because there are multiple ways to measure success. Ninety percent of businesses use Google Analytics to measure the effectiveness of their content while others use click tracking. Other businesses track emails sent in correlation with buys made from that same email account. But few metrics tell the whole story.

A more reliable way to measure success is through relationships. A few valuable relationships are worth more than thousands of emails sent to people who don’t care. Those who care or who have benefited will tell your company’s story best. From a corporate perspective, you should be creating a culture of marketing throughout your organization. Without this, valuable customer stories will be lost.

John’s actionable advice

Here’s the takeaway - slow down to speed up. If you want to improve, you need to take time to be more strategic. You could call this professional development but in reality it has a lot in common with self care. This may look like getting out of the office for a day to spend time thinking and reflecting. Or it may look like taking intentional time every week to evaluate your time management and progress.

But one of the best ways to administer self care as a professional is to attend a conference and refresh your perspective. For many involved in marketing this may sound counterintuitive. Attend a conference to learn rather than promote? The answer is yes. It will revolutionize and energize your future marketing. So slow down. Then speed up.

John’s book recommendation

The book that shaped John’s career the most was a biography about Larry H. Miller. It’s the life story of a underprivileged high school student who never finished college, yet he became one of the most successful businessmen in Salt Lake City. Larry’s passion for business done well is a driving force behind what John does today. You can read Larry’s story in Behind the Drive: 99 Inspiring Stories from the Life of an American Entrepreneur or in his autobiography, Driven: An Autobiography.

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Connect with John Lynn

Interested in connecting with John Lynn or attending one of his conferences? Here’s where to find him